For REAL NEWS ... GET INFORMED! TODAY at San Javier Murcia Airport, Spain LOW Cost Ads! --- THE Newspaper for the COSTA CALIDA --- FREE Ad. Design Service! Home Contact Local News Worldwide Amusing Stories Classifieds Clubs/Societies Emergency & Useful Numbers Horoscope Pharmacy Rotas To the EDITOR Advertising Rates, etc. Newspaper Subscription Mail Direct to the Editor WORLD NEWS    Rescuing 33 miners trapped in Chile 'to take months'    Beer microbes live 553 days outside ISS    St-3    St-4 Amusing Stories Rescuing 33 miners trapped in Chile 'to take months': It will take at least four months to rescue 33 miners trapped underground in Chile, the head of the rescue operation has said. Rescuers made contact with the miners by lowering a probe into the mine, 17 days after the men became trapped. The miners, stuck in a mine shaft shelter some 700m (2,300ft) down, sent up a note saying they were all alive. Rescuers are now preparing to drill a wider hole through which they can bring the miners to the surface. The chief engineer in charge of the rescue operation, Andres Sougarret, said a larger and more powerful drill would be needed to dig the hole at the San Jose gold and copper mine near the city of Copiapo. "A shaft 66cm (26 inches) in diameter will take at least 120 days," he said. Rescuers plan to send narrow plastic tubes down the narrow borehole already drilled with food, hydration gels and equipment that will allow them to communicate with relatives - including cameras and microphones. The men have been trapped since 5 August when the main access tunnel collapsed. They are said to be trapped 4.5 miles (7 km) inside the mine, in a space the size of a small flat. Before drilling the borehole, rescuers reportedly had to give up efforts to get past the cave-in and to try to reach the miners through a ventilation shaft because of the instability of the mine. Until Sunday, there had been no word from the miners and hopes for their survival were fading. The announcement that they were still alive was made on Sunday by Chilean President Sebastian Pinera. Surrounded by relatives of the miners who have gathered outside the mine, he held up a note from the miners saying: "All 33 of us are fine in the shelter." "It will take months to get them out," Mr Pinera said. "They'll come out thin and dirty, but whole and strong." Mr Pinera also saw images of the miners taken by a camera that was lowered down the borehole. The men were bare-chested, apparently due to the heat, but officials said they were in better condition than expected. "Many of them approached the camera and put their faces right up against it, like children, and we could see happiness and hope in their eyes," Mr Pinera said. The eldest of the miners, 63-year-old Mario Gomez, sent up a letter to his wife in which he said he was sure the miners would survive. "Dear Liliana, I'm well, thank God. I hope to get out soon. Have patience and faith," the letter said. "I haven't stopped thinking about all of you for a single moment." He also said miners had been able to hear drilling above them as rescuers made several failed attempts to locate them. The accident has raised concerns about mining safety in Chile, and the company that owns the mine and the national mining service have both been criticised for failing to comply with regulations. "This company has got to modernise," Mr Gomez said in his letter. News that the miners were still alive was met with relief across Chile, and people gathered at the main square in the capital, Santiago, to celebrate. Outside the mine, Mario Gomez's daughter said she could not wait to talk to him. "No-one will be able to take this happiness away from me," she said. "I've never felt anything like this in my life. It's like being born again." The fact that the miners will have a communication channel to relatives is expected to help them cope with the ordeal. Todd Russell, an Australian miner who was trapped 3,000ft underground in Tasmania after an earthquake in 2006, said he and a second miner who survived the collapse relied on each other for support. "It's amazing what your body can do," he told the BBC World Service. "We survived on hope and courage, and each other, [and] we were lucky enough to have a bit of underground mine water." "They're lucky that they've got 33 guys there with them that they can rely on each other," Mr Russell said. Back to Top  or   NEXT STORY Beer microbes live 553 days outside ISS: A small English fishing village has produced an out-of-this-world discovery. Bacteria taken from cliffs at Beer on the South Coast have shown themselves to be hardy space travellers. The bugs were put on the exterior of the space station to see how they would cope in the hostile conditions that exist above the Earth's atmosphere. And when scientists inspected the microbes a year and a half later, they found many were still alive. These survivors are now thriving in a laboratory at the Open University (OU) in Milton Keynes. The experiment is part of a quest to find microbes that could be useful to future astronauts who venture beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the rest of the Solar System. OU researcher Dr Karen Olsson-Francis told BBC News: "It has been proposed that bacteria could be used in life-support systems to recycle everything. There is also the concept that if we were to develop bases on the Moon or Mars, we could use bacteria for 'bio-mining' - using them to extract important minerals from rocks." This type of research also plays into the popular theory that micro-organisms can somehow be transported between the planets in rocks - in meteorites - to seed life where it does not yet exist. The Beer microbes were placed on the European Space Agency's (Esa) Technology Exposure Facility, a collection of experimental boxes at the end of the International Space Station's (ISS) Columbus Laboratory. The bacteria were sent up still sitting on, and in, small chunks of cliff rock. They would have been exposed to extreme ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, and dramatic shifts in temperature. All the water in the limestone would also have boiled away into the vacuum of space. Quite how they managed to come through their 553-day ordeal is now being investigated. Bacterial spores have been known to endure several years in orbit but this is the longest any cells of cyanobacteria, or photosynthesising microbes, have been seen to survive in space. The bugs have been classified simply as OU-20. However, they resemble closely a group of cyanobacteria known as Gloeocapsa. They have a thick cell wall and this could be part of the reason they survived so long in space. "Gloeocapsa forms a colony of multiple cells that probably protects cells in the centre to exposure from UV radiation and provides some desiccation resistance as well," explained Professor Charles Cockell, who works with Dr Olsson-Francis in the OU's Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute. "The ones we have are related to Antarctic species but they're also generally quite well-known in hot deserts. So, as well as the colony-forming habit, I suspect they've got quite good DNA-repair processes, too." When the OU team despatched the Beer rock to the station, all it knew was that the cliff material contained communities of different bacteria. The scientists had no idea which, if any, would make it back to the ground alive. Exposure on the platform therefore worked like a screen, identifying bugs likely to have special properties. "We could send up the spores of known 'extremophiles' and we can be pretty sure they will survive because we know already they're really resistant," Dr Olsson-Francis told BBC News. "Whereas in this case, we just used a community to select for these organisms. These are just everyday organisms that live on the coast in Beer in Devon and they can survive in space." The Beer rock was launched to the ISS in 2008. More cliff material was also put on a much shorter space exposure experiment lasting 10 days the previous year. Called Biopan-6, it was lofted by the Russians. OU-20 came through that challenge, too. Biopan-6 was the experiment famously survived by a group of "water bears". These tiny invertebrates hold the record for the longest-lived animals in open space. 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